Since I’d been a young kid I’d loved books and read constantly. I loved mysteries and horror stories and books on history and art and science and music, everything. The bigger the book, the better; I deliberately found the thickest novels I could, for the pleasure of lingering in other worlds and other people’s lives for as long as possible. I borrowed six books a week, the limit, from the library and devoured potboilers and war stories and histories of the Apollo space program and Russian novels I could make neither heads nor tails of and it was all thrilling. What I loved most was how the contents of each batch of books mixed up with one another in my mind to make ideas and images and thoughts I’d never have imagined possible.

from Enon by Paul Harding

Were you a voracious reader as a kid, too?
I was.
Oh, wait —
I still am … and proud of it!

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2 thoughts on “On the love of books”

As a child, I remember having favorite books that I would repeatedly take out of the library. I particularly loved Virginia Lee Burton (don’t know if they have her books in Aust.) During my first pregnancy I got back into reading novels, which I prefer over non-fiction. When they talk about the end of books, I try not to panic. There are too many of us who love the printed word in our hands.

I think books will always be around, no matter how technology-oriented our world becomes. There are too many book-lovers like you and me for them to totally disappear.
I’ll look up Virginia Lee Burton — I hadn’t heard of her. Thanks for the tip 🙂

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